Chapter 143: The Price of Betrayal

The last words went through the defenders like ice picks. They looked at the predatory horsemen, at the wretched state of Ser Harris and his men, remembered the tideline at Seagard, and their will to fight melted the way snow melts when the sun finally decides. Reymond Vance stood on his wall and felt the cold reach his bones. No relief. No hope. Not even soldiers who still believed. To hold out was only to bury his family with his mistake. In the evening the gates of Maegor’s Hold opened, and Ser Reymond Vance came out on foot with his armor stripped and his own hands bound, leading the kin and knights of the rising, and knelt in the dust before Arthur’s horse.

“The sinner Reymond Vance... begs the duke... for mercy...” He pressed himself to the ground, voice shaking, tears and worse running freely.

Arthur did not dismount. He looked down at him, and at the ashen men behind him, and his voice was the wind off a winter field.

“Ser Vance. Ser Harroway. And every knight and noble who joined this rising. You broke your oaths, you dealt with a foreign enemy, and you raised rebellion. Your crimes have earned death.” He paused, and his gaze went over the terrified faces and up to the soldiers on the walls who had laid down their arms and did not know what they were now. “But the Lord Paramount of the Trident must carry the thunderbolt and the thought of mercy in the same hand. The ringleaders answer. The followers are forgiven. Reymond Vance. Harris Harroway. Tomorrow at noon you will be executed before Maegor’s Hold, as a lesson written large. Your immediate kin are stripped of title and land and exiled to the Wall, never to come south again. The knights who rode with you forfeit lands and goods, and will atone in the mines or in the black of the Night’s Watch. The common soldiers who have laid down their arms are pursued no further; they will be disbanded and sent home.”

“The lands of House Vance of Maegor’s Hold and of House Harroway pass under the Warden’s direct rule. Every family that was coerced, or that stood aside, will pay a heavy fine in atonement, and will send a hostage to Casterly Rock as proof of its loyalty.”

“And as for the banners of House Tully,” and here his gaze sharpened to something that made men look away, “from this day, within the borders of the Riverlands, to hide or to fly them is treason, and will be answered as treason. Lord Edmure Tully is enjoying his retirement at Casterly Rock. The future of the Trident has nothing further to do with the trout.”

When the sentences were done there was a dead silence outside Maegor’s Hold, with only the wind keening through it. The rebel lords lay where they had collapsed. Around them, soldiers and the smallfolk watching from a distance felt the same braid of fear and awe: the young duke of the west and Lord Paramount of the Trident had declared, in the most direct and bloody grammar there is, who ruled this land, and what betrayal of him cost.

At noon the next day, before more eyes than anyone counted, Reymond Vance and Harris Harroway were beheaded, and their heads hung three days above the gates of Maegor’s Hold. Kator’s detachment swept the east like a comb, hunting the rising’s fugitives, receiving the surrender of castle after castle, and steadying the terrified villages, while Ser Rhaegar came on from the Golden Tooth and Lord Gawen from the Crag, and the sight of their columns finished whatever arguments were still being whispered in the halls of the undecided.

The rebellion of the Riverlands, so shortly lit, was stamped out entire, from the raid at Seagard to the surrender of Maegor’s Hold in a handful of days, and the speed of it, the hardness of it, and the reach of the lesson left the whole Trident, and every power watching, from Highgarden to the Eyrie to Sunspear to the two courts of the dragon and the lion, very quiet for a while. Arthur had poured cold iron into the foundations of his newest and most fragile realm. The price was real: riders lost, men and horses emptied, and wounds and fear in the east that would not heal by decree. So was the effect. In the near term, no one in the Riverlands would raise a hand against him in the open. In the long term, he had set an example that would be retold for a generation, mostly in lowered voices.

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And he knew, standing in the chill wind below the gate and its new ornaments, that the true trouble was likely only beginning. Petyr Baelish did not stop because one landing burned. Dorne watched from the south with its appetite showing. The truce with the Reach was paper. The dragon and the lion still tore at each other in the east, and the North lay silent under its snow. Arthur looked toward the mountains of the Vale, resting his hand on the cold hilt at his hip, and his thoughts ran long and in no comfortable direction.

The blood at Maegor’s Hold worked on the Riverlands like ice water into boiling oil. Every unrest, every grievance, every opportunist’s half-formed plan went down together under a lid of fear and awe. The border with the Reach lay quiet under the truce, the sea lanes held under Lord Jason’s patrols, and the one open flame of rebellion had been stamped out with an iron heel. Arthur seemed, at last, to have bought himself a breath.

But no one in Westeros with eyes, least of all Arthur, believed that the Vale’s probe had ended anything. Petyr Baelish was not a player who quit a game because his opening gambit was taken. He was the kind who planted long seeds in losing positions and waited for the season to turn.

While Arthur sat at Maegor’s Hold cleaning up after the rising, soothing the eastern lords and arranging the defense and governance to follow, fragments of intelligence about the Vale began arriving at his desk by every quiet channel he owned: Grey Shadow’s infiltrators, observations from Lord Jason’s ships, and the private reports of a few river lords with old ties across the mountains, all of them newly terrified and newly eager to prove their loyalty. The pieces were vague, contradictory, sometimes plainly false. Assembled, they sketched a picture deeper and worse than the landing had been.

In the Eyrie, at the top of the Mountains of the Moon, Petyr Baelish stood at the window of his study, a room that looked down on the whole Vale and, on a clear day, out toward the narrow sea. He turned a carved chalcedony chess piece from across the water in his fingers and held a glass of chilled Arbor gold, and outside the window the Vale’s summer lay green and bright, streams running, mountains shining, a landscape in perfect agreement with the calm, faintly pleased expression on his face, as if no one had bled at Seagard at all.

“Cousin Donnel. A pity. He might have been more careful.” He said it to himself in the tone a man uses for a damaged tool. “Still, his sacrifice was not without value. We have measured the western duke’s speed, and his style. His grip on the Riverlands is stronger than expected. His methods are more... direct.” He sipped the wine. “And directness makes enemies. The blood at Maegor’s Hold will not soak into that soil quickly. It will ferment in the shade, and breed new resentment, particularly in the houses that are frightened now, and were out of pocket before.”

He crossed to the great mahogany desk. What lay on it was not a war map. It was ledgers, contracts, sealed letters, and a long, carefully drawn analysis of the houses of the North: their present state, their resources, their quarrels, and what each might be induced to trade. Beside it lay a cryptic note out of King’s Landing from the Spider, who remained shut up in the Red Keep and had apparently never stopped working for a day.

“Lord Varys believes the queen and the dragon are locked in the most painful kind of stalemate, both bleeding, both overdrawn. The Stormlands’ fall has stripped the capital’s southeastern shield, and handed Dorne... well. Prince Doran is an old fox. He strikes rarely, and takes the choicest cut when he does.” His finger tapped the letter lightly. “Which suits us. The longer the south’s chaos runs, and the more strength it swallows, the freer the Vale’s hands become.”

He took up the northern report, and his gaze went deep and still. “The North. Always the North. A frozen fertile land, torn by war, famine, the Others, and its own quarrels, sitting on foundations no one has ever broken. Bran Stark is a cripple lost in green dreams. Luwin is old. Umber, Karstark, Mormont are barely alive. There will never be a better hour for an acquisition.” He set it down and looked out the window again, toward the southwest this time, and the smile that bent his mouth had frost in it. “But before the acquisition, the springboard. The Riverlands would have made a perfect one, and a granary besides. Unfortunately the western barbarian got there first, and digested it faster than anyone guessed. No matter. When one attempt fails, there is always the next. If the Riverlands will not be ours, they can at least be unstable. Let the duke guard against the Reach, watch Dorne, digest the Trident’s wounds, worry for his sea lanes. His strength disperses. His attention is pulled a dozen ways at once.”